The St. Ambrose School for Girls(115)

“Outside Wycliffe. After dinner.” Strots shakes her head. “It was dark. No one really saw us. I went to her room a little later. She was alone. I told her I wanted to make a deal with her, that she needed to meet me down by the river before curfew so we would have some privacy.” Strots’s eyes are looking toward me, but she’s no longer seeing me. “I thought it through before I left the dorm. I put a hat down on my head low. I had gloves on. I had the knife in the pocket of my sweatshirt—I’d seen it on the plate under your laundry bag in your closet. I waited at the big rock for a while. I was worried she was going to blow me off. Then I was worried she wouldn’t come alone, that Francesca or Stacia might be with her. But eventually she showed up by herself, and I…”

Strots’s voice fades. When she starts talking again, she has to clear her throat. “As soon as I saw her, I chickened out. I couldn’t follow through with it. Except then… she started talking at me, and she got into last year, all the shit she did to me. She was throwing it in my face, laughing—I just lost it.”

She looks down at her hands again like she doesn’t recognize them. “I didn’t mean to kill her. Even after all that planning, I don’t know what I was thinking. But then it happened and I just panicked. I buried the knife about fifty yards away from the big rock in a hollowed-out stump. I came back here, had a shower, and hid my clothes. The next day I took them down to the gym and washed them in the industrial machines with the towels from practice. Then when no one was looking, I threw them away in the dumpster because I knew pickup was in the morning.”

Dimly, I’m aware that there are flashing lights down below in the parking area. Red and blue. The alternating colors penetrate our bank of windows and strobe the ceiling.

“But the knife…” I look to the space between the desks.

“I got paranoid the cops would find it out by the river. So last night I went down and got it back from the stump. I was lucky. They’d been scrambling and hadn’t really searched the area properly.”

I crab-walk backward across the floor, until the metal frame of my bed prevents me from going any farther. In a messy haul, I peel myself up off the pine boards and dump my body on my mattress so that I am on the same level Strots is.

“So where’s the knife now?” I ask.

She narrows her eyes. “You don’t know what just happened?”

“We both just confessed to murder,” I mutter dryly. “I’m pretty clear on that.”

“Well, see, here’s the funny part,” she says without smiling. “I was wondering what to do with the knife, you know, all anxious and shit. I came back right after my last class and decided I wasn’t going to practice. I was going to grab my cigarettes and go down into town to look for a better place to get rid of the blade after dark. When I got to our floor, I heard this weird noise coming out of Nick Hollis’s apartment. It was like a thump and then shuffling.”

She doesn’t go any further.

Through the open sash on her side of our window, I hear male voices. And then they cut off sharply, like the people, like the police, entered the dorm through the back door.

The hairs at the nape of my neck stand up. “What was the sound, Strots.”

She rubs her face. “Anyway, I just kept on going. I went to the bathroom, you know, then came in here. You weren’t back from class yet because you have chemistry lab. I got my cigs and left.” Her eyes focus on the middle ground between us. “Town didn’t do shit for me. When I returned, I came up the stairs again, and I couldn’t get the noise out of my head. It was so… weird, and hell, maybe I knew what it was in the back of my mind. I knocked on Nick Hollis’s door. Then I tried the knob. When I opened things…” Her right eye starts to twitch. “He was hanging from a belt off a hook in one of the ceiling beams. He’d knocked a chair over under his feet. I think the shuffling noise was his toes, you know… brushing against the side of the chair.”

“Oh… fuck.” I put my hands to my face. “Oh, God, is he dead? Oh, fuck fuck fuck—”

“Yeah, he was gone by then. He wasn’t moving anymore. His eyes were open… and he wasn’t, like, twitching, or anything. No nothing.” She looks down at the floor. “And that’s when I realized…”

I blink a couple of times. “You left the knife in his apartment.”

“Yeah.” She takes a deep breath. “No one else was around. No one else knew what I saw. I backed out of his place, closed the door, and ran down here. When I came in, I saw the desks pushed apart and the knife lying on the floor out in the open. I kind of hoped you were the one who found it, but I prayed that you hadn’t touched it. Did you? Did you touch it?”

“No,” I whisper.

“Good. I got my gloves on, took the knife, and I made sure nobody was out in the hall when I went back to his apartment. I put the knife right on the kitchen counter, and then I made sure I left the door open some. I knew that sooner or later someone would look in. And that’s why the police are here. Someone did. Someone called them.”

I focus on the ceiling and stare at the blinking lights that flash over our heads.

“Is this real?” I ask no one in particular. “Is this actually happening?”

Strots gets up from her bed and faces the window.